A Town In The City

December 17, 2000|By MATT SCHUDEL Arts Writer

Outside it's a typical South Florida afternoon of humidity, hostility and streets under construction. You get out of your car and walk into the new development called CityPlace, not knowing what to expect, and suddenly you find yourself standing in the middle of an Italian hill town. You look around and notice that you aren't the only person staring in disbelief.

Since CityPlace opened in late October, no one has been sure quite what to make of this new retail and residential complex that sprouted from bare earth to become the sparkling showcase of West Palm Beach's resurgent downtown. Is it a mall? Is it a housing development? Is it a brand new town? Is it a collection of pretty Disneyesque facades that have jumped off a designer's drawing board?

Well, in varying degrees, it's all of these things, but most of all Palladium at CityPlace, as it is officially known, is a new way of looking at what an American city is supposed to be. It is a dramatic statement that a crumbling downtown can be revived through sound thinking and smart design.

"It gives West Palm Beach a great push toward re-establishing itself," says Rick Gonzalez, an architect who worked on the project. "It tells people that it's shed its stepsister image to Palm Beach and is independent and unique. It gives West Palm Beach its own sense of identity."

You might think that's a lot for a real-estate development to offer, but then CityPlace is no ordinary development. When complete, it will cover 72 acres on both sides of Okeechobee Boulevard in downtown West Palm Beach, directly across from the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. (The current development, on the north side of Okeechobee, covers 55 acres. The other 17 acres will be the site of a convention center and hotel, scheduled to be finished in 2003.)

As a mixed-use enterprise, CityPlace combines retail stores with nearly 600 townhouses, condominiums and apartments. It conforms to the grid plan of West Palm Beach, with city streets running through the middle of the design. The only thing remotely like it in South Florida is Mizner Park in Boca Raton, but the $550million CityPlace is twice as large, visually more interesting and woven more smoothly into the urban fabric. It had taken West Palm Beach a century to build 600,000 square feet of downtown retail space. CityPlace doubled that in two years. But don't call it a mall.

"It drives me up the wall when somebody calls it a mall," says Nancy Graham, the former mayor of West Palm Beach, who spearheaded the building of CityPlace and the downtown revival. "If that's a mall, then Worth Avenue is a mall, Las Olas is a mall. We were trying to create places that people would like to come to 25, 50 or 100 years from now."

With an almost spiritual ambition of bringing new life to an entire community, CityPlace already has architects, developers and urban planners pointing to West Palm Beach as the way a city is supposed to be revived.

"I think it could be a turning point for the city," says Howard Elkus, the chief architect of CityPlace. "Within the first week, I had half a dozen calls from other developers, saying, `Do more of the same.' A major developer told me he didn't know of a more exciting project in the country. It's very seldom that you have this opportunity."

A bumpy start

It took an improbable chain of events to bring CityPlace to life. The first step came in the mid-1980s, when a pair of real estate investors, Henry Rolfs and David Paladino, bought 77 acres of neglected land in downtown West Palm Beach, with the aim of building a grand development. When the economy went into a slump in the early 1990s, they lost their land to foreclosure, but not before they had given five acres to the city. In 1990 that plot became the site of the Kravis Center, which opened in 1992.

Meanwhile, West Palm Beach passed a referendum in early 1991 abolishing the city manager form of city government in favor of a strong mayor. In November of that year Nancy Graham was elected mayor, with the vision of making West Palm Beach "the best medium-sized city in the country."

"She took a lot of chances," says Bill Fountain, the director of the West Palm Beach Downtown Development Authority. "It took a lot of guts and political savvy to get things going."

She pushed for a $750,000 fountain that others thought was a foolish expense. But today the Centennial Fountain at the eastern end of Clematis Street is a major attraction and the symbol of the city. She led a drive for a new master plan for the city, hiring Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk to draw it up.